Western Digital (WD) HDD Colours

What is the difference between WD Hard Drive colours?

In this article we will compare and show you the main differences between Western Digital’s internal desktop hard-drives, their up’s and down’s, where and how to use them.

WD Green

WD Green is the low-end branch of WD that offered a lower power consumption, a higher storage capacity at a affordable price with variable RPM‘s ( Rotation Per Minute) ranging between 5400-5900/s that caused the Green one’s to crash when used on a daily base. Moving forward to the “Green-Blue” WD’s we will stop and look at the “mainstream” branch of WD hard drives. (WD Green is now WD Blue).

WD Blue

WD Blue hard-drives offers a range of disk space from 250 GB to 6TB, RPM’s ranging from 5400 to 7200 and a cache space of 16mb, a single one with 32mb and 64mb.The newest and most appreciated move is the use o a 1TB single platter that allows higher speed’s due to the higher density, the shortage of movement on the disk that leads to a small seek time of data and a higher processing rate.

WD Black

WD Black hard-drives offers the high-end section of Western Digital hard drives. With storage capacities ranging from 1TB to 6TB, the black series are well and wide known as reliable, long-term alternative for any sector of users, from desktop users to gamers and professional power-users.

WD Red

WD Red is designed for NAS (Network Attached Storage) which is engineered to handle the increased workloads of a NAS system. (You can also use this hard drive in your desktop PC.)

WD Red Pro

WD Red Pro is designed for NAS (Network Attached Storage), but it is also a very good hard drive for your desktop PC, it is as fast as the WD black, more quiet and probably more reliable, but more expensive.

WD Purple

WD Purple is designed for Surveillance DVR storage. With IntelliPower RPM it can vary the rotational speed from 5400rpm to 7200rpm which will lower the power consumption and maybe maximize the life of the hard drive.

WD Gold

WD Gold is designed for Servers designed to handle workloads up to 550TB per year which is among the highest workload capability of 3.5-inch hard drives. The WD Gold hard drives have a very high reliability, with a MTBF of 2.5 million hours, that is two times more than WD Black or WD Red Pro HDDs. Is it worth to pay the extra price for a WD Gold HDD ? It depends for what you need it, but unless you need it for a server with very high workloads then you will be better with a WD Red Pro or Black HDD which have a better price and similar performance.